For the record, I don’t assume that crazy people lack free will, and have never heard anybody but you suggest they do. They see reality different than I do and have different priorities, but still make decisions from their own perspective.
I also don’t consider having a gun to your head to rob you of your free will; you could always choose death, after all. There are probably some actions you would choose death rather than do. In either case you are still making the decision yourself - you just have to choose amongst terrible options.
I find that hard to believe. You’ve never heard someone say insane people don’t know right from wrong? What this implies is that crazy people can’t be judged as immoral because something in their mind prevents them from making good choices. They see a knife and are uninhibited in picking it up and stabbing someone, because their brain fails to override this impulse. They become convinced God has commanded them to drown their baby and lack the cognitive ability to ignore this order.
Everyone sees reality differently and has different priorities. If that was enough to make someone crazy, we’d all need to be committed.
If choosing to eat vanilla instead of chocolate ice cream is as much of an exercise of “free will” as choosing to do anything under the threat of murder, then its a meaningless concept and a rather shallow philosophical exercise to talk about it.
There’s a huge difference between not knowing right from wrong and being incapable of freely choosing between options based on your blue and orange morality. I mean, you say it yourself - it’s not knowing right from wrong - it’s a knowledge and awareness issue. There have been many times where I didn’t know right from wrong and made choices - and then somebody angrily told me what they thought was right and wrong. The crazy people you’re talking about just aren’t cognitively capable of comprehending and incorporating an understanding of objective reality into their decision-making process.
And most of the people I know claim that their God has commanded them to do things, and “lack the cognitive ability” to ignore the orders. If that’s a benchmark for being too crazy to have free will, then I’m not sure I know many sane people.
Whether a subject is worthy of discussion is a value judgement, and I don’t agree with you. Discussing free will is fun.
And “free will” is not the same thing as “is fortunate enough to always have only pleasant options to choose between”.
Mm-hmm. I’m already talking to a few people with odd definitions of free will in this very thread. Am I to be disturbed by a summary that implies somebody else is trying (explicitly!) to redefine the term to mean something different?
Non-atheists and many atheists believe we all give it a whole lot of thought, like they do. The excluded muddle stopped at “a god isn’t needed to make shit work,” and left it at that.
To be clear, “not knowing right from wrong” isn’t any educated person’s definition of insanity, but its a common enough view that to claim never encountering it defies belief.
And really, you’re still defying it by parsing the word “know” literally. If insanity was thought to be a simple lack of knowledge, we’d be committing the mentally ill to schools rather than hospitals. Calling it a “knowledge and awareness issue” is so obviously wrong that it’s borderline offensive. Someone who eats a bullet after being tormented with suicidal ideation is not just ignorant or misinformed; their brain is producing pathological thought patterns that are beyond their control, driving them to do harm to themselves.
Some of them are. Depressed people who commit suicde often rationally know killing themselves is bad. The person who is unable to resist the impulse to grab and stab also might know this is bad. Where things breakdown is not their comprehension of reality; it’s their ability to regulate their behavior. The mental checks and balances that keep normal people in line are faulty in the mental ill.
So what deeper insights are obtainable from a discussion about free will if we start with the premise that that everyone from the mental ill, hostage victims, two year olds, and Jane Doe miscelllanious person on the street, all exercise free will? What is there really to talk about if we’re not supposed to see important differences in the kind of choices available to these people based on the limitations of their mind?
Not at all. You’re supposed to merely see how insular and unread it looks to say you’ve never heard it argued the mentally ill are deficient in free will. It’s like saying you never heard of California.
If anyone should believe in free will, it’s atheists. The opposite of free will, as originally conceived, specifically requires us to be constrained in our behavior by a creator.
And in reality, we should know by now that it is not a simple dichotomy anyway. There are degrees and grades of freedom, depending on the complexity of the particular system and it’s relationship to the environment and other systems.
It also seems like the whole free will debates that are typically made are often mislabeled attempts to really argue about the nature of consciousness rather choice.
Cognition is not an emotionless, analytical process. Emotion is involved as well. Emotion can effect decision-making, of course. It’s not all about rationality, and if you’re trying to define “free will” as “only makes purely rational, analytical decisions”, then you have excluded pretty much all of humanity.
It’s interesting to ponder the effect that mind-altering chemicals have on cognition, but things get odd when you try to say that introducing them eliminates free will because there are ‘mind-altering chemicals’ in everyone’s brains all the time. It’s sort of like the earlier argument that getting really angry could somehow abrogate free will; people always have an emotional state, so why would some emotions and not others interfere? And on a similar point, if a person’s insanity is generated by their own brain chemicals, why does their arrangement of chemicals break it, and not everyone’s?
Externally introducing mind-altering chemicals alters cognitive function. (Not to state the obvious or anything.) But does it abrogate free will? And if so, when? Does taking a whiff of a beer and letting a handful of aerosol alcohol particles enter your nasal vessels shut it off? Does taking an aspirin to reduce a headache shut it off?
Myself, I come at this from the approach that free will is being free from something. Traditionally that ‘something’ was God, gods, or the fates. Supernatural entities that reach in and take control.
If your position is instead that your own brain is what you need to be free of, then nobody has free will, obviously. And ‘their own brain’ is the thing that these insane people are being manipulated by. I don’t think it’s sensible to say that they have to be free of their own brains to have free will.
Well, first you can notice that hostage victims aren’t suffering from limitations on their minds, and that if your approach to free will is reliant on grouping them in with people who arguably do then your approach to free will has a problem. Of all the things which could theoretically abrogate free will, having a gun to your head is not one of them.
I’ll concede I haven’t engaged in many discussion of free will where people try to say that large swaths of the human population don’t have it, but others do. Because, to be frank, that’s absurd. Honestly it sounds like the first steps towards justifying a pogrom.
I fail to see any functional difference between extrapolating the future with 100% accuracy and actually seeing the future. The point of the allegory was not to proclaim that you or reality is fictional, but to show that your “choice” is pre-determined just like a character’s choices in a fiction movie.
I wasn’t totally sure that you admitted this stipulation, but it is clear now that you do.
As I said before, you must be using an unorthodox definition of “decision”. Normally it is nonsensical to talk of a person making a decision where only one option is presented. Could you elaborate on this?
Having stipulated that your “choices” are all pre-determined, I can only guess that you have redefined “choice”. In my understanding of the word, a choice between one option only is no choice at all. It is not even a Hobson’s choice. Your mental cognition could not, or should I say will not result in you eating the ghost peppers; that would be physically impossible. You do not have it in your power to eat the ghost peppers, or to eat neither. You think you can choose otherwise, but to the demon this is demonstrably false because it is physically impossible for you to “choose” anything except the strawberries. You say that is a choice, but how can it be a choice if you have not the power to effect an alternative result?
You say “if my mental math had mechanically resulted in me eating the ghost peppers”, but this is moot because if the demon predicts that you will eat the strawberries, your mental math cannot result in you eating the ghost peppers.
I’m not bothered when you bring up predeterminism, and I am not necessarily bothered with the union of predeterminism and free will (depending on the definition of free will). I am bothered when you say predeterminism is compatible with the ability for people to make decisions or choices, because it would seem that makes a contradiction.
A lack of appealing alternatives does not remove the apparent incohesiveness of your own philosophy. One alternative is found in dualism. Another alternative is found by rejecting free will. Yet another alternative is a rejection of free will and determinism.
Here you are redefining “choice” to include a situation where only one path is physically impossible, or perhaps I misunderstand. How can it still be a choice if it is physically impossible to select any other option? Assuming predeterminism, I could only say he did something terrible, or that he appeared to choose to do something terrible, not that he chose to do something terrible.
I don’t understand you. Metaphysically you are saying that everything, everything can be determined by the previous state of the universe. That includes the murderer’s state of mind. The murderer’s state of mind at the moment he fires into a schoolhouse can be determined with 100% accuracy by looking at the state of the universe at the previous instant. The murderer’s state of mind at the previous instant can be determined by looking at the state of the universe the instant before that. Etcetera until we reach the point where the murderer’s mind exists in one instant and does not exist in the previous instant, or if you want to avoid the sorites paradox, at some point the murderer did not exist at all yet with enough information we could extrapolate exactly when and where he will shoot schoolchildren. There is no room for alternatives - our prediction, if we were as informed as Laplace’s demon, would be exact.
For you to assign culpability is then to redefine culpability, because in the normal sense of the word there is no culpability when one has no power to effect an alternative; there is no culpability if one has no choice. Let’s say you had a neurological disorder which caused you to constantly pinch and unpinch your thumb and forefinger as if you were using a television remote. This specific disorder also makes it so that your brain is essentially hotwired to consciously perform this action; you want to pinch your fingers together. I place an unarmed button-style nuclear detonator in your hand, such that it cannot be removed, and tell you not to press the button or millions of people will die. Your neurological disorder means you want to press the button anyways, so you do so. Your “decision” takes place entirely within your head. I tell you the button will be armed in one minute. One minute later some city blows up. I am obviously a monster, but I escape while you are caught by the authorities. Assuming you can prove exactly what happened, do you have any sort of culpability?
A choice is a selection between multiple possible options, and when the deterministic meat robot named begbert2 is staring at those two plates, it is considering multiple possible options. The processes it uses to assess the options are deterministic, yes, and in the end a single specific outcome will be decided upon, but that outcome was chosen from among several options. And the fact that in the end only a single one of those choices was picked doesn’t mean there weren’t multiple options being considered and selected from.
Look at it this way: by your argument, you have never made a choice in your life. Because when you look back, you only selected one of the possible options, and that’s the one you selected. That’s the one option that occurred; only one outcome took place, and none of the others.
In hindsight, one outcome was inevitable, because it was the one outcome you didn’t evit. (Avoid). Foresight is the same way: you look into the future, and only see one outcome. In both cases it doesn’t mean that other options weren’t considered and chosen from.
You demonstrate awareness that “could not” and “will not” don’t mean the same thing. Which is correct. And in this discussion, it’s very important.
That’s the subtle thing about this - free will doesn’t require you to choose a different option - it only states that you have to have been able to pick a different option if you wanted to. And that still applies here - it’s just that you don’t want to. The scenario in question, between a desirable thing and an undesirable thing, it can occur within any model of free will. Choosing the desirable thing doesn’t automatically mean you don’t have free will. You only lack free will if you didn’t have the ability to choose differently even if you had wanted to.
In the deterministic model, if I had wanted to eat the death peppers I could have done so. But I didn’t - and that fact is observable by examining my brain state. The mind works on sensible rules - the mind, the desires of the mind, determines what it chooses. To argue that that’s not the case is to say that humans are completely random, which conflicts with all evidence. Which means that we do indeed have state that determines our actions - under any non-absurd cognition model, even one involving souls.
The Demon simply has an insider line into our internal state. It doesn’t change that state - if I had wanted to eat peppers, it couldn’t do anything about that. But I didn’t, so it saw my choice coming, based on knowing what I want, based on knowing my mental state.
Again, it depends on how the predetermination works. If your actions are predetermined against your will, where an external force is manipulating your environments or even your thoughts to force you to kill your father and screw your mother, then that’s incompatible with free will because it posits an external force you aren’t free from. But if your fate is predetermined by your own actions and choices, as in my model, then that’s not an abrogation of free will - that’s you making your own bed and lying in it.
And, of course, there’s making a closer examination and determining that what was apparently incohesiveness, wasn’t.
But he did make choices. He made his bed and lay in it - and just because the train wreck would be predictable to a sufficiently informed outside observer doesn’t mean he didn’t do it himself.
Whether or not you can predict it, it’s still the murder’s mind making the troublesome decision calculations - the choices. It doesn’t matter that he only chose one course of action in the end, or that other people’s choices resulted in him being born. His choices were still his own, and he definitely still made them.
Okay, this is a response to not understanding that just because you are predictable that doesn’t mean you still aren’t taking your own actions. This is not a proper analogy, because in your analogy I never make any decisions that lead to the negative outcome. That very much does not apply to people who make the choice to murder on their own with their own minds.
Cool, you’ve definitely got more science than I do.
Reminds me of when my HS dtr was working in the library shelving books. She brought home a book on genetics. Said it was directed at lay people, but didn’t distort things too much. I made it through page 17. When I told her, she said, Good to know. Next time I’m shelving in juvenile I’ll look for something for you with pop-ups!"
But don’t you see? Predeterminism means it is impossible for you to want otherwise, therefore it is meaningless to say you “have been able to pick a different option if you wanted to”. The alternative reality where you picked the death peppers did not, does not, will not ever possibly exist. There is no path between T0 and T1 where you eat peppers at T1.
You could not have wanted to eat the death peppers. Assuming predeterminism, you don’t have a choice in what you “want” any more than you have a choice in what you “do”.
Either I misunderstand you or you misunderstand me, because I fail to see the difference between the “choice” made in the detonator analogy and the “choice” made in the strawberry analogy. Specifically I don’t see any functional difference between a brain disorder which leaves only one possible option and predetermination which leaves only one possible option. Could point how they are different?
I had thought about an analogy where I pushed you over and you fell on a child, but it occurred to me that you might object in that your brain and cognition had no role in the child’s injury. In the analogy of the detonator, your brain with its disorder actually causes the bomb to detonate, and does so willingly after considering the millions of lives at stake. I don’t expect you to argue that you are more than your brain, and I don’t expect you to absolve yourself of culpability on the basis of a neurological disorder unless you claim that you did not press the button, or that you were not a person. In those cases, the followup question is “why not?” and I think the answer will contradict something else you said.
We can observe and identify a brain disorder. We can even induce one. We’ve not yet identified predetermination except as a hypothesis. So they are different in the way that we can reproduce one and not the other.
I’m going to quibble with you here, as someone who has experienced suicidal ideation.
When I was in the throes of depression, I intellectually understood that my suicide would hurt others and thus was “bad”. But did I emotionally understand this? Nah. The idea of dying felt good. Really, really good. The idea of my family being stricken by grief registered very little emotion in me. It was something I needed to be regularly reminded of because it was easy to forget (please don’t hate me! I was sick!).
I don’t know why I didn’t kill myself. But I suspect it was because my suicidal ideation would come and go. I would experience it for a several minutes (like while sitting in a dreadful staff meeting) and then it would fade. And when it wasn’t there, I could usually look back and see how much I was buggin’. I suspect if my suicidal thoughts had been persistent and not paired with the afterwash shaming thought of “You are buggin’!”, I probably would have done…something…
So I don’t think that mentally ill people just have a problem with regulating their behavior (which is a facile argument, if you think about it). I think their behavior would actually make sense if it was possible to look into their thought processes and see the decision tree their brains used to make that choice. I think thought processes are what distinguish so-called sane from so-called insane brains. For the latter, their thoughts aren’t connected to the kind of emotions that coerce “sane” behavior, and the content of their thoughts is more disinhibited. They don’t think “cute animal” when they see a goat, but instead think “Satan coming to kill me”. A less crazy person may have thoughts like this sometimes, but their brains don’t bother “tagging” them with any emotion. So the thought just disappears harmlessly. But a crazy brain hangs on to these crazy thoughts and actually treats them like they are “regular” thoughts by associating them with strong emotions. The behavior that follows is thus logical, given the programming they follow from.
This is why I think it is wrong to conclude that so-called normal people have free will but so-called crazy people don’t. So-called normal people behave according to the thoughts+feelings that coerce them (whether consciously or subconsciously) just like so-called crazy people do. The difference between them is in the content of their thoughts and the rapid post-processing of those thoughts (i.e., which emotions get attached to them). There is no little/no difference in the degree of “impulsiveness” because none of us are really spending a lot of time thinking before we act. We all act then tell ourselves a “just so” story after the fact that explains our reasoning…and even then, we only do this for acts that we are called out on. For 99% of the acts we perform, we do them seamlessly, without any conscious deliberation and with no Monday morning quarterbacking afterwards.
One gets called “impulsive” when they commit an act that defies (apparent) reasoning. However, if an act makes sense to everyone else or the act winds up having a positive outcome, then the actor gets called wise and contemplative.
I think people severely underestimate the role of emotions in decision-making.
I think the reason I’m so passionate about this topic is because I know what it feels like to not have the sensation of free will. When I was in the worst phase of my depression several years ago, I experienced catatonia. I would be walking down the street on my way to work and suddenly I would freeze. My feet would instantly feel glued to the sidewalk. It was as if I had no “will” to move.
Not only was I always conscious during these spells, but I was hyperconscious of both the world around me and my inner world. My mindspace would always fill with all these swirling, opposing, loud thoughts.
“Move.”
“No.”
“We will be late to work if you don’t move.”
“No.”
“The cars are honking at us because we are standing in the middle of the intersection. So let’s at least get back on the curb.”
“No.”
“It’s hot. Can we at least walk over into the shade.”
“No.”
“This is weird. We should at least call for help.”
“No.”
And while all of this would be occurring, there was nothing but numbness. Zero emotions. Not even fear. Even when people were yelling at me.
My hypothesis is that I would freeze up like this whenever my brain stopped being able to associate thoughts with emotions. Without any coercive push (fear of being late or fear of getting run over by cars), my brain couldn’t land on any decision. Cuz all the decisions were equal. Standing in the middle of the street seemed just as reasonable as anything else I could come up with.
I have no idea what would occurr in my brain to “unstick” me. All I know is that one moment I wouldn’t be stuck and then the next moment, I would be moving in the direction of my office. I never did anything consciously to get myself out of the “no will” moment. It would just happen.
So I think this experience is what helped me to see that (at least for me) I ain’t doing any contemplative, deep, fact-based thinking when I make decisions. My feet move not because I consciously will them to move, not because I’ve weighed the pros and cons of them moving beforehand, but because of impulses coming from my brain that I’m not aware of. If I need emotion to help me decide whether to do something as basic as getting out of the middle of rush hour traffic, then I need emotion to help me make all other decisions. And since I don’t consciously decide what my affective state is or whether one particular emotion is associated with one particular thought, then I can’t say I authored my decisions free from external constraint, independent of initial conditions (like my brain’s executive functioning ability or affective state). All I can say is that I made a decision and maybe it was because of X, Y, or Z.
I don’t know why I need to tack on anything more to that statement than that. And I don’t know why others feel compelled to tack on anything else either.
Cool, you’ve definitely got more science than I do.
Reminds me of when my dtr was in HS, and working in the local library shelving books. She brought home a book on genetics. Said it was directed at lay people, but didn’t distort things too much. I made it through page 17. When I told her, she said, “Good to know. Next time I’m shelving in juvenile I’ll look for something for you with pop-ups!”
I’ve said this before but it doesn’t seem to provoke discussion; but I’ll try again:
In all these discussions of free will versus determinism, we spend a lot of time unpacking what “free” or “choice” or “causal” or “volition” mean. But we treat the “self” – the consciousness that either is or is not freely choosing, etc – as if it were self-explanatory.
Let’s posit for a moment that Joe Blow, individual, at the moment of behavior-selecting, is “determined by the previous state of the universe” as Max S so eloquently expressed it above. And yet there’s a consciousness that experiences emotional intensities, the desire for certain outcomes, as monstro in turn describes, also above. If Joe is not choosing of free will, maybe it makes more sense to say that the Self isn’t actually Joe. Joe is just the meatware that acts as the antenna that receives and processes the net sum of all the stimuli and serves as a a localized focus for the “previous state of universe”, but the true Self is the comprehensive total of all that’s happening and, in its entirely the entire system experiences itself, localized within Joe, as doing all of this deliberately.
We do experience ourselves as thinking, feeling, choosing. We are not an illlusion to ourselves. But perhaps our individual personhood is the illusion.
Before you dismiss this as lots of woo: I’m quite certain that this is true of the social self. In other words, never mind (for now) the whole universe of deterministic physics, let’s just look at individual person in the social sea of other people who constitute one’s culture. We think we are thinking, feeling, developing opinions at the individual level. We’re mostly not. We’re mostly processing, at the individual level, ongoing long-term thoughts that the species as a whole (or the culture at any rate) is mulling over, and our input as individuals feeds into what the collective Us is deciding. The vast majority of the concepts we’re using as well as the vast majority of the specific opinions that we as individuals hold are actually things we picked from an array of attitudes and beliefs that were “already out there”, floating around in our social space, for us to select from. Social-science types (e.g. sociologists) deny free will not in the physics-spacetime-particles-causal-determinism sense but in the social-determinism sense. That we’re puppets of our socialization, etc. They’re wrong too: the self is not an individual but that doesn’t mean there’s no self. We’re integrated; the species is conscious.
Well, perhaps when you extend the question to the whole gamut of universal physical determinism, which could be used to argue that the entire freaking species doesn’t have free will either since it’s being acted on by the surrounding universe etc, the self is actually present in the whole situation, being purposeful and not merely passively reacting to something non-Self that constitutes an externalia.
Just want to chime in and say that I concur with monstro 100%, but don’t think I have much to add that hasn’t been said already. But I will note, in response to:
. . . that more and more science comes out challenging the idea of free will/choice every day. We witness and understand environmental pressures having predictable outcomes on decision making all the time. The trajectory of the research is that free will is non-existent, yet we continue as a society to fight for policy decisions that ignore this; that sacrifice people/populations at the feet of the god of Free Will.
I’ll conclude by saying, I’m going to click the “Post Quick Reply” button. Sometimes I type something and don’t. But I choose to today. But maybe it’s because I got enough sleep last night. Or maybe what I ate for breakfast. Or that I just scratched my ear and got distracted by the cat. Or maybe the fact that I had a decent childhood. Or maybe my particular balance of hormones combined with my height and weight.
Or, truly, it’s a combination of all of those factors, plus an infinite number of others, all influencing what I do in this moment. Clicking the button. Or not. Now I’m feeling like maybe this is nonsense and I shouldn’t share it. But I didn’t choose to feel that. Will that feeling override my desire to participate in the conversation? I don’t know, but I do know that the “choice” I’m about to make is about a chemical assessment of feelings/motivators I’m experiencing; my choice will be directly because of those things, and not in spite of them, or outside of them.
